<b>188 jobs leaving</b> | The Huerfano County Correctional Center in Walsenburg isslated to shut down April 2. The last inmates at the privately run prison were scheduledto leave Monday for a newly built facility in Arizona.

<b>Business goes under </b>| Sales associate Leanna Border cleans up the last pieces of shelving lastweek at the closed Duckwall's Hometown Variety Store.

Joe Kancilia has owned The Pawn Shop for 21 years in Walsenberg. The Huerfano County Correctional Center is closing April 2, another blow to this community of 4,000.

Profits from the store, owned by a national chain, had evaporated in the past year. Now the town’s second-biggest employer, the Huerfano County Correctional Center, was set to lay off 188 employees and close its doors April 2, making the store’s prospects for a financial rebound unlikely.

After a 16-year run, Duckwall’s did not renew its lease for the building on the corner of Sixth and Main streets, and so six more part-time employees in this southern Colorado town of about 4,000 — already hard hit by the recession — lost their jobs.

“The economy of this town is zilch. The prison closing down is going to hurt,” said Joe Kancilia, who owns a gun and furniture shop a few blocks west of Duckwall’s.

Walsenburg is one of many small Colorado towns where privately run prisons drive the economy. But many states, including Colorado, are cutting their contracts with private jailers.

Corrections Corporation of America announced it would close the Walsenburg prison after Arizona said earlier this year that it was withdrawing all of its 700 inmates from the facility. On Monday, the last inmate was to climb aboard a bus headed for a newly constructed state-owned prison in Arizona.

The Huerfano prison, just east of Interstate 25, will remain closed until CCA enters a contract with Colorado — or with another state overflowing with prisoners and enough money to ship them to Walsenburg.

Prison population down

Colorado Department of Corrections spokeswoman Kath er ine Sanguinetti said Colorado’s prison population is declining for the first time in decades and the state will fill its own prisons first. CCA is seeking a new contract but doesn’t have any prospects yet, spokesman Steve Owen said.

Walsenburg stands to lose up to $300,000 a year because of lost utilities, taxes and fees paid by the prison, city administrator Alan Hein said.

The city had laid off a fifth of its staff of 50 since November because of recession-related budget shortfalls. Last week, Hein laid off five more employees, including two police officers, because of the prison closure.

“The prison closing is adding insult to injury,” he said.

Huerfano County will lose $135,000 a year in payments it received from the prison that it had used to buy two sheriff’s department cars the past year. The county also used prison payments to contribute $500 a month to the nonprofit business that runs the Fox Theater, the only movie theater in town.

George Birrer, who refurbished the theater in 1985 after it had been closed for 12 years, said residents will have to drive 40 miles north to Pueblo to see a movie if the theater closes. The theater also has held plays and other cultural performances.

“What else do you have in the city for youth?” said Birrer, 72, a biochemist who moved to town from Long Beach, Calif., after retiring.

A losing business

Kancilia, 55, who has run his gun and furniture store for 21 years, said he will lose business from customers who worked at the prison and are now moving. He also sold about $300 in bullets each month to the prison for target practice.

He said that when he recently attended a Walsenburg City Council meeting, council members notified the Police Department in anticipation of another one of his profane tirades about climbing utility rates he believes are connected to the prison’s leaving.

Kirk Mitchell is a general assignment reporter at The Denver Post who focuses on criminal justice stories. He began working at the newspaper in 1998, after writing for newspapers in Mesa, Ariz., and Twin Falls, Idaho, and The Associated Press in Salt Lake City. Mitchell first started writing the Cold Case blog in Fall 2007, in part because Colorado has more than 1,400 unsolved homicides.

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